AVAILABLE SPARES

PAY AROUND

13m £649.99; 14.5m £799

Drennan International’s latest mid-priced 13m and 14.5m Series 7 poles are billed by their creators as all-rounders, equally at home catching carp or silverfish.

Now, that in itself intrigues me. Some months ago I was lucky enough to handle an early prototype of this pole. I thought it was well balanced and stiff, and its assembled length was spot-on accurate, not something that can be said of many poles. Nor did it need any cutting back to take the PTFE bushes, so no complaints on that score.

However, the pole I handled was definitely more geared toward silverfish than carp. I thought that it lacked a bit of brawn across its top sections, although it was well balanced and perfectly fishable at its full length.

In a similar vein to its award winning Acolyte Carp pole, Drennan supplies the Series 7 with top kits featuring its unique roller cone side puller system, along with a box of pole accessory paraphernalia that offers many elastication options. Skid bungs and EVA nose cones, which help to keep the pole in tip-top working order, complete the list of goodies.

What I was most excited about, though, was to discover whether the Drennan team had tuned the Series 7 up a bit from the prototype so it was able to handle much bigger fish. The Drennan way is to dot every ‘I’ and cross every cross every ‘T’ before a product is released on to the market, so I had few doubts that the pole’s ‘all-rounder’ tag would prove to be correct.

To put it through its paces I took the 14.5m Series 7 along to one of the best live test venues I know of. Oxfordshire’s famous Rolfs Lake is packed with big carp that have seen it all before, and are renowned for being battle-hardened. Believe me, over the years I have seen some seriously expensive and supposedly super-strong Match kits completely destroyed by these finned devils, originally stocked the creator of the lake, Rolf Wobbeking, and now lovingly tended by John Bennett.

With these Rolfs Lake fish having such a reputation for mayhem I chose a Carp 2 side puller top kit with fairly hefty Drennan Pink Bungee elastic rated 14-16 – despite this being winter, when fish are supposedly lethargic.

I kicked off the session with maggots fished on the drop at full depth, and caught a few small roach – not particularly exciting, as I had hoped for the odd big chub to put in an appearance. Still, it proved the pole had enough stiffness to generate a quick tip speed at its full 14.5m length, proving its worth for silverfish.

A change to a single grain of sweetcorn brought about an altogether different response from the Rolfs fish. I didn’t have to wait long for the float to disappear, and in an instant the pole hooped over as a carp, less than chuffed about having its lip pulled, used its tackle-snapping cocktail of strength and speed to attempt an escape. Now we would really see how powerful the Drennan team had ended up making the Series 7 pole.

Clearly, as you can see in the photograph, its flexing action still spreads across its top five sections, and while this clearly isn’t an out-and-out power carp pole, the section walls are beefy enough to instil an air of confidence, should you hook up with a unit.

When under stress the section joints all pull apart quickly and cleanly, and just to give the pole the full Rolfs treatment I even foolishly attempted to play a few fish off sections 5 and 6, just to see if it would collapse under the strain.

I can happily report that even when subjected to what would have to be classed as bad angling practice, the Series 7 remained firm and reliable, turning in a good all-round performance…. just as Drennan said it would.